The project itself sits on donations of a few hundred BTC, check their page on archive.org for their old donation address that was switched without any comment recently. The funds are still there.

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Another interesting project along these lines is DataHaven.NET. The developers recently created a currency-based marketplace for P2P encrypted storage, and have stated they're interested in integrating Tahoe-LAFS. However, it's not clear how they'll accomplish this.

I've been experimenting with integrating Tahoe with Electrum for syncing plugin data. It's not intended to become a general data storage solution, but it would greatly benefit from there being an accounting or quota system built into Tahoe, as suggested ITT.

I figure the wallet storage grid could be volunteer driven in the short-term until something is worked out. Still, my concern is with backing up Tahoe directory writecaps, of the form:

The above URI is the key to your files stored in Tahoe almost like a Bitcoin private key is the key to your stored Bitcoin. You can't afford to lose it.

The following bash function hex encodes the Tahoe writecap then passes it through Electrum's mnemonic system. The number of words generated is large but manageable. In cases where only temporary storage space on a grid is needed, the number of words may be irrelevant.

The more interesting aspect of this is it gives each Tahoe writecap its own deterministic Bitcoin wallet. It's also possible to make a simple brainwallet with it, but with Electrum you get a fully deterministic wallet with more features.

Assuming the tahoe-client is running on a trusted local device, it may be possible for the writecap to autonomously negotiate for space in the storage grid to which it belongs. In particular, because the writecap is self-aware of its own Electrum seed, it could in theory create and authorize a micropayment channel with the tahoe grid. There are many workable variations to this approach.

Only the user, and the machine controlled by the user, would know the Electrum wallet seed, because the seed would be the writecap. The writecap would need to stay a secret, but if so, the user could pay for a storage subscription by transferring coins into the writecap wallet.

Payment is an entirely separate issue. Fundamentally, giving a person 57 words to write down or memorize, then ensuring him that his writecap will always be around with his files, regardless of what needs to happen on the server side, could be an issue for those seeking reliable long-term storage. I'm not clear on what happens if the grid introducer must be moved or replaced, or if this too could happen autonomously. Maybe it's possible to run an "ongoing" grid of some kind. Maybe the grid is created with X introducer.furl but later changes to Y introducer.furl, and all previously participating storage-node operators would update their node to point to Y introducer.furl. I don't know enough about Tahoe to say whether this negates the location of previously-created writecaps or if this is even a concern.

Another interesting project along these lines is DataHaven.NET. The developers recently created a currency-based marketplace for P2P encrypted storage, and have stated they're interested in integrating Tahoe-LAFS. However, it's not clear how they'll accomplish this.

Interesting. Though it does look a little like the project is dying. Also where is the github/source link?

One problem with their market approach is that they are effectively price fixing. It would be better to have the market decide the price of storage based on the provider's reputation/capabilities/performance etc.

It would be pretty sweet to have semi-autonomous applications that are able to negotiate their own data storage contracts via a nice API.